BMI may understand the epidemic of obesity

New Delhi,
Tue, 03 Apr 2012NI Wire

According to a recent study in US, Body-mass index BMI, widely used across
the globe by the medical experts, health insurers and the fitness industry for
more than 200 years may be classifying almost half of women and just over 20 per
cent of men as healthy as their body-fat composition suggests they are obese.

The study used a patient's ratio of fat to lean muscle mass as the "gold
standard" to detect obesity and the results suggested that it can guide an
individual for the risk of health problems.

The body fat can better predict the health risks of an individual than the
BMI, suggested the researchers in a report to LA Times.

The American Society of Bariatric Physicians used as costly diagnostic test
called dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry, or DXA was used to measure the fatness
and the subject level of obesity was calculated that was based on
fat-composition standards.

The results of the study also suggested that, for men BMI is a poor measure
of fatness in but not every time. Moreover, it was observed that 20 percent of
the total men tested who were healthier and normal were found obese when tested
with the new measure.

But the observation was more frequent in case of women. However, men who were
found obese by the BMI standard were reclassified as normal and healthy when
measured with the DXA.

“Though men fared better than women under the proposed new standard, the
resulting picture is uniformly grim”, according to the study's authors, Dr.
Nirav R. Shah, New York's state commissioner of health, and Dr. Eric Braverman,
a New York City internist in private practice.

"We may be much further behind than we thought" in addressing the nation's
crisis of obesity, the researchers wrote.

In an interview, Braverman taunted BMI as "the baloney mass index" and said
the widespread use of this technique as "feeding the failure" of public health
policies and treatments with an objective to fight obesity. The 1,393 patients
participated in the study were from his Manhattan practice.

The practices applied for shedding the extra pound form the body of the
patient can result in weight loss for a short period of time and they will
regain the weight again in long term, said, Braverman.

The medical interferences will prove more effective if it focuses to
encourage the patients to work on their body composition towards lean muscle
mass with the help of more exercise, more sleep and healthier eating instead of
focusing on weight, he added.

The details of the study were published Monday in the journal PLoS One.